The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) update again asked that consumers check their homes and freezers for the recalled whole pigs and should not eat cook or them. Retailers were told not sell the products and restaurants not to serve them.
The CDC’s National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) laboratory conducted antibiotic resistance testing on clinical isolates from three infected people and found all isolates of the Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:- strain to be resistant to ampicillin, streptomycin, sulfisoxazole, and tetracycline.
Antibiotic resistance has become a very troubling issue worldwide. Public Health officials in the U.S. are using the PulseNet system to identify illnesses that may be a part of this outbreak. PulseNet uses DNA “fingerprints” to identify bacteria from patients with illnesses to find unidentified clusters of a disease.
To identify the strain of Salmonella in the Washington state food-borne illness outbreak, the CDC used Pulsed Field Gel Electrophoresis (PFGE) to identify the Salmonella subtype.
PulseNet manages a database of DNA fingerprints to identify possible outbreaks. In the case of the Washington state outbreak, the CDC found five DNA fingerprints (outbreak strains) of this particular Salmonella strain, all of them rare to the Washington state region.
In the Washington state outbreak, illnesses started on dates ranging from April 25, 2015, to August 1, 2015. The ages of people affected by the illness ranged from a one-year-old to age 90, with a median age of 35. Of the 134 illnesses confirmed to date, 16 people were hospitalized and no deaths were reported.
The CDC has put out a chart that shows the number of people who became ill each day of the outbreak. It is called an epidemic curve or epi curve:
It should be noted that illnesses that occur after July 27 may not have been reported yet because of the time it takes between when a person becomes ill and when the illness is reported. This takes an average of two to four weeks.
